Will A Nice-guy Makeover Suit Gingrich?

WASHINGTON — I recognized the speaker, even though he did not have a snake draped around his neck.

He wanted to sit on his patio in the Capitol, overlooking the Washington Monument, but the spring day did not disguise his autumnal quality. He's no longer the ebullient revolutionary who described himself as a 4-year-old in search of a cookie.

The man who boasted in the flush of the '94 elections that his revolution could change America's moral character has been tempered. "We're not used to being the majority," concedes Newt Gingrich, in shirt sleeves and green dinosaur tie.

Two smart, prolix, pudgy, undisciplined Baby Boomers went into battle on the budget. One came out looking adult. Gingrich had a tantrum about his treatment on Air Force One and lost control of his rabid freshmen. (Who do these guys think they are? he railed to a friend. "You," the reply came back.)

He went into the budget debate with a cocky attitude, but no fallback plan. "He defined victory as having Clinton cry uncle," said a pal.

Gingrich says the Democrats were out to get him, recalling a 1994 New Republic column by Robert Wright exhorting: "I say we beat the noxious little butterball to a pulp."

Fearing he was hurting his revolution, he dropped out of sight last December. "You have to pull out to re-enter, to get a sense of vision and strategies," he says. Now his House troops, frustrated by the Democrats doing a fandango on their party, want him to re-engage.

"It's the only time in my entire career people have asked me to speak out," he said with a dry smile. "My grandmother must be looking down from heaven in total disbelief. She always told me that I talked too much. It's nice to be wanted."

The old bomb-thrower is returning as healer, talking about melding his "anxiety-ridden" factions into a team.

"We can win if we just go out in a calm, methodical way and make clear the choice," he says. "You say Charlie Rangel or Bill Archer? Teddy Kennedy or Orrin Hatch? The gap here is, like, gigantic."

Before the speaker had a chance to play healer, the junior senator from New York let loose, mocking "the mythical Contract with America" and telling radio talk host Don Imus on Thursday that Gingrich had misread the '94 elections and cut too much from education and the environment.

Al D'Amato wanted to separate DoleGingrich, which the White House troops pronounce as one word. Democrats learned, with DukakisHorton, the value of tying a scary symbol to a lackluster candidate.

Gingrich was none too pleased to have D'Amato pass judgment on him, but he stayed calm.

"He should be careful on Imus--he got in a lot of trouble last time," Gingrich digs, alluding to the senator's ill-advised Judge Ito imitation. "He voted for everything he's now complaining about."

Of the Dole-Clinton matchup, Gingrich says: "I'm not sure that dignity loses to garrulousness." The speaker, who knows the perils of garrulousness, sounds as if he's taking the older man as a model. "Bob Dole has been through a lot and he learned when he was disciplined and focused and endured, he did fine."

Is he impressed with the way Dick Morris has refashioned Clinton's image as mature centrist?

"Laurence Olivier plays many roles," he said of the president. "If you stipulate somebody as a good actor, why should it surprise you when they act well? Is somebody who's always sincere ever sincere?"

He said he had refused to hire Morris because he felt the consultant was willing to run false ads and believed in "power at any cost." It sounds disingenuous, given the Republican record on untruth in advertising, but he continues: "The Dick Morris model is essentially P.T. Barnum. Dick Morris and his client are clever enough to go from sucker to sucker until they win the election. Our model, which perfectly fits the Dole reality, is Abraham Lincoln."

Over at The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol was depressed about "Newt's team stuff." "The point isn't for him to come back and be a nice guy," he says. "He has to lead the advance into enemy territory."

I asked the most unpopular politician in America if he still dreams of the presidency.

"Who knows?" he says, staring out into the drizzly day. "You get eight years of the Dole presidency and by then I may be too tired and I may want to go play with the dinosaurs and animals."